Mr.
Kerry, who served in Vietnam, seems to have forgotten that 200,000 Montagnard indigenous people of Vietnam died while supporting
and fighting for the U.S. For the past 40 years the Montagnard's have
suffered imprisonment, torture and even death for attempting to
practice their own religion rather than the state sponsored one.
The Montagnard's freedoms are grossly restricted. I am personally aware of
a young pregnant woman with a serious heart defect who was knocked
from her bike, beaten and is now under house arrest for her religions
practices. Her husband and friends are now in jail too. Montagnard
refugees who visit family in Vietnam are harassed and
restricted to their village. A young Montagnard man, an American citizen,
was harassed so badly that he left before he completed his visit. Police
show up at Montagnard parties and weddings. The U.S. is effectively doing business
with a police state.

Mr.
Obama has been lecturing African nations on human rights and
encouraging them to be more like the U.S. saying: "We believe these things [human rights] and we are
going to keep talking about them." Obama's speeches went on while he
was aggressively pushed the trade act, which places no conditions on
Vietnam as far as human rights are concerned. Despite the fact that
the trade agreement gives the U.S. a great opportunity to leverage its trade power
on Vietnam to make sure that it finally does something about human
rights. Mr. Obama's rhetoric, considering his personal failure to
protect human rights in Vietnam, can only be called hypocrisy.

Obama blithely ignores pleas from human rights groups to take action on human rights in
trade deals. It is abundantly clear that what Obama, Kerry,
and the U.S. government do is mostly just talk about human rights, because they have
done too little about Vietnam's treatment of the Montagnards in 20 years and are doing
too little now. This is hypocrisy at the highest levels, and the
so-called legacy that the Obama administration is so focused on leaving
will be tainted with the failures on human rights.

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There
have been a number of attempts by concerned and conscientious
Congressmen to pass legislation insisting that the U.S. does something
about human rights in Vietnam by restricting trade, etc. One attempt failed
in 2003 and another attempt in 2013 (House Bill 1897) passed the House but died in the
Senate. In 2014 House Bill 4254 called for sanctions on individuals
committing human rights abuses saying:

"Enhancement
of relations between the United States and Vietnam has provided an
opportunity for a human rights dialogue, but is unlikely to lead to
future progress on human rights issues in Vietnam unless the United
States makes clear that such progress is an essential prerequisite
for further enhancements in the bilateral relationship."

The House Bill 4254
went nowhere.

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Is
this the best we can do with our commitment to human rights and democracy? We are the
country which claims to hold these rights as the sacred and fundamental
values we live by, yet we do too little to prove that we mean
them when it comes to action.

We,
as citizens, need to prove our commitment to human rights by pressing our representatives to refuse
to ratify the trade act until conditions on human rights are inserted
in the trade act, which will force Vietnam to finally honor their
commitments to so.

It's
time the U.S. also honored its commitment to human rights, which to
date has been as vacuous as Vietnam's in so far as the indigenous Montagnard
people of that country are concerned.

Let's
end the Montagnard's long suffering and the hypocrisy and restore our real
belief in human rights!